Rachel Lloyd is the founder and director of Girls Education and Mentoring Services (GEMS), an organization that helps girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to exit the sex industry, and provides them with the skills and knowledge to move on with their lives. GEMS, which is the largest organization of its kind in the US, was the subject of the gripping documentary Very Young Girls. Lloyd founded GEMS in 1998, “on her kitchen table,” she says, and has since grown it into an essential and influential organization.

Lloyd is a former sex worker herself, and she believes that women who work or have worked in the sex industry should be on ...